October 20 marks the 35th anniversary of George Stigler’s Nobel prize, the first of Booth School of Business’s grand total of eight Nobels. To celebrate the occasion, his longtime colleague at Chicago Booth Sam Peltzman offers a preview of the memorial lecture he’ll deliver at our November “Stigler in the 21st Century” conference.

The IGM Center at the University of Chicago has asked its American and European economist panel to rate the main causes of the financial crisis. For both American and European economists, the main culprit of the crisis was financial regulation and supervision.

In an interview with ProMarket, Swedish political scientist Bo Rothstein explains why he decided to resign from the Blavatnik School of Government after learning that Leonard Blavatnik, the school’s main financial backer, had made a substantial contribution to President Trump’s inauguration.

In the second part of our two-part interview with Daniel Goldstein, MD, an oncologist who studies the influence of business interests on healthcare, we talk about the capture of the health system by pharmaceutical companies.

The failure of Enron and subsequent demise of Arthur Andersen led to significant changes for public reporting and auditing but not much change in the concentration of audit market power among the remaining Big Four global firms: Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG, and PwC.

Neoclassical economic theory assumes that firms have no power to influence the rules of the game. A new paper by Luigi Zingales argues: This is true only in competitive product markets. When firms have market power, they will seek and obtain political influence and vice versa.

The recently-released secret taping of a conversation between Brazil’s president Michel Temer and one of the country’s most prominent businessmen reveals the extent to which big business influences politics and the judiciary in Brazil.

When regulation protects narrow interests – usually the interests of the incumbent industry – at the expense of the public interest. Capture occurs in various ways: from straightforward bribes and threats, to more implicit quid pro quos such as the lucrative future employment (revolving door), to softer forms of cognitive/cultural capture.

“… as a rule, regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its benefit.” George Stigler – The Theory of Economic Regulation (1971)